User blog:Karaya One/Mercenaries of Galm: Hounds of War-Where the Story Started...
2/16/16-The Beginning (Warning, SPOILERS! If you haven't finished reading Mercenaries of Galm: Hounds of War, DO NOT READ! If you wish to read it: ''https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10951578/1/Mercenaries-of-Galm-Hounds-of-War)'' Growing up, I honestly never saw myself writing for fun. It was, for a long time, a rather alien concept to me. Writing for fun? Pah! That's for geeks! Who would want to do that, Ha! I saw it as work, something I had to struggle with and just...get through. During this time, I thought writing was something you did in school, and then forgot it. I was, terribly, utterly wrong. A combination of two factors really played into me being here. One, I'm a person who is very self-critical of their work. I was never satisfied with my school papers and works, even if I had gotten a perfect score. I would look back on them and say to myself 'That's not right, I can do better here, here, and here'. So, I had the drive necessary to get started, but it wasn't until I became increasingly unsatisfied with video game stories, that really drove me over the edge. Three years ago, I fixed my Playstation 2 in order to play all of my Ace Combat games again. I was really excited to do it, and it was just as good as I remembered. The sweeping landscapes, colorful characters, fantastic combat, and incredibly detailed histories of the Strangereal world, snapped me awake. I realized that the video game culture was stuck in this, for lack of a better term, Matrix. People were being spoon-fed mediocre games, costing increasingly more money, all the while the gaming media was reaffirming them that this era was 'better than anything before'. It was a lie. And I was shocked to discover it, like many others. My method of attack was slightly different, and came to me by an almost complete accident. One afternoon, while I was away from home in a hotel room, for some reason I decided to google the F-35. I can't remember why. But up comes this result on Google, The Ultimate Ace. Now, to those well versed in the history of Ace Combat fanfiction, The Ultimate Ace is one of the most well-regarded pieces of work in the entire area of Ace Combat on the Fanfiction.net site, and for a good reason. It was, and still is, incredibly good. The author had managed to capture the essence of the game in the form of a novel, and that idea blew me away. I wanted more of it, and my video games could no longer provide those colorful, rich worlds that I had in my head. I needed to let them out. So, for around another year and a half, I drafted around 50 different ideas that I was considering to pursue. I went through each one and destroyed them. I sat and critiqued them to the point of insanity, scrutinizing every bad detail, forgotten tangent, and poor sturcture, until they crumbled to dust. But, as you know, one stood tall above the ashes of the destroyed stories. That story is Mercenaries of Galm: Hounds of War. I got the idea to do the story with a Cipher as a Belkan from my three-week long visit to Europe. I spent a good week in Northern Germany, surrounded by an amazing rural flying culture, which had sprang up in the 1930's as a part of the National Socialist's plan to train pilots unofficially for armed conflict in the coming future. This played a huge role in educating German fighter aces in plane control as even the famous Erich Hartmann, the real Karaya One, started on gliders, even teaching others to fly on them during his teen years. 80 years later, the culture is still alive. Germans in the farmlands go out an enjoy the blue skies on a regular basis, and even they were kind enough to let me tag along too! It really opened my eyes to the fact that Germany itself had been dehumanized after the Second World War, constantly thrashed and bashed for the actions of people from almost a century before. That was where Erich Völler sprang from. Erich himself is blend of several people. His name is a combination of fighter ace Erich Hartmann, and footballer Rudi Völler. However, his mannerisms and actions are distinictly from one person. Der Rote Piloten. Manfred von Richthofen, more commonly known as The Red Baron. His Rittmeister cane, the dog Moritz especially should've alerted any suspicisons to similarity of character, the organization of the first modernly feared squadron the Galm Team, along with the uniform he wore(which I purposefully made similar to the German Air Force's uniform in WWI), were all inspired by The Red Baron. His tactics were similar, sticking to a strict engagement policy(ergo, The Dicta Boelcke) which ensured not only his survival, but the survivial of his wingmen. One would notice that all the squadron deaths in the air were either completely out of Cipher's control, or were when the pilot disregarded the engagement policy and it bit them back hard. My reason for making Cipher 'The Red Baron' type character was this. In my personal opinion(and in the case of the trilogy structure I'm going with), The Ace Combat 4, 5, and Zero trilogy tells the stories of three aces. Zero tells the story of watershed, the pilot that changed the way the game was played, which is exactly what Manfred von Richthofen did. Although Boelcke and Immelmann were the first aces, they are forgotten to the masses and are mostly remembered by aerial history buffs who revere them(I do as well). 4 tells the story of the most successful solo pilot who again changed the landscape of aerial tactics, which is very similar to Erich Hartmann along with Russian ace Alexander Pokryshkin. 5 tells the story of an extremely successful squadron, fronted by a pilot rivaling Mobius and Cipher, which in the real world reflects on two squadrons, the insanely successful JG 52 on the Eastern Front of WWII, which produced several 100+ kill aces, and the AVG or 'Flying Tigers' which turned the tide against the Japanese in Nationalist China before the U.S. officially entered the war with only P-40 Warhawks, an incredible feat at the time against 'superior' A6M Zeroes. But back to Erich, the point of his creation was to reflect the change in the mindset of the pilot in the Strangereal world, where there was, at last, a pilot capable of replecating success that had only been seen in a WWII-era battlefield with a few fighter planes. I also used him to show that his success was due to his excellent training, along with a group of his good friends who he trained with to back him up. Erich was also meant to be a slight anti-thesis to the typical 'I can do everything myself' Ace trope that a lot of authors seem to fall into, in my opinion. More often than not in the real world, pilots are selected for a specific role, air superiority, ground attack, electronic warfare, etc., and they stick to that. In fact, Erich Hartmann blasted the idea of him doing ground-attack strafing runs, since it got him shot down more than once. The story as a whole was supposed to be a reflection on the history of air combat, tying in real world names that most have forgotten and bringing them back to be retold to a new audience. I hoped that people would have renewed interest in their stories, like me, and continue to tell those stories to the generations of the future. Anyways, that's all for this week. Next week, I'm going to talk about how I write my aerial combat, and possibly a small outpouring on my new project. Auf Wiedersehen, Karaya One Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts